Being old has some benefits. Not many, but some. Having old stuff you bought 40 years ago become collector's items is one. Living long enough to compare what people, politicians, and the media promised, to what they actually delivered is another.
I grew up as a kid in the 70s, and I loved movies. We lived on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere northern California, so going to town for a movie was a special treat. Maybe one or two times a year, mom would make time in her shopping trip to town to take us to the movies.
When the Mt. Shasta Mall was built in 1975, it had a movie theater inside the mall! You have no idea how big of a deal this was for a town the size of Redding. We were now able to go to a movie while mom shopped. Still, movies in a theater were not a regular thing, maybe a few big movies a year.
However, sometime around 1980 a Satellite TV salesman drove into the ranch and sold my father on buying one of those gigantic 9' satellite dishes. It was heaven for a kid going into high school. HBO had just come out, and it was subscription free on the big dish. I could watch what would become 'Cable TV' out in the hinterlands, for free. It was pretty cool.
All these new movies, and there was no internet or Rotten Tomatoes, so you just watched whatever was on and hoped it was good. Many of the 1970s movies were the strange 'new Hollywood' type films. They were almost incompressible for a kid who grew up going to a three-room elementary school, and chased cows most of my childhood.
The gritty New York scenes of Taxi Driver, or the Manhattan world of Annie Hall, were a world away from me. I still watched them, but I could not identify with the world they were living in, it may have been a different planet. I could barely make heads or tails of the characters as well. I would just watch them and think, well, I guess that's how things work in New York. I imagine it would be the same for someone living in the city watching a western and thinking that's how I lived.
Some folks see movies as a powerful force driving the cultural changes of the times. I think that rarely happens, but it certainly can. Some of these 70's films changed culture in ways that very few people, if any, saw coming.
So here are the three films I picked. Movies that have made real, measurable, and lifelong changes to the America I grew up in.
One flew over the Cuckoo's nest - 1975
All the President's men - 1976
The China Syndrome - 1979
Why these three? Well, I've just had so many people my age whose only understanding of a topic has come from watching one of these movies.
Today, I will talk about the first: One flew over the Cuckoo's nest.
The film is based around a character named Mac, played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson. Mac is a petty convict who plays the criminal justice system by pretending to be insane to get out of long prison sentence. He is sent to mental institution instead of prison. There, he runs up against the hard and fast rules of the institution, and his nemesis, Nurse Rached. The movie shows the mental institution as a dark, oppressive place, where the patients are kept under strict rules, and receive harsh treatment if they disobey.
If you haven't seen it, you should, so I won't give away any spoilers. My critique of the movie isn't that it showed what could be a very oppressive place for the patients, not at all. I believe that those judicially ruled insane should be given the opportunity to live as much of a well-adjusted life as they are capable of doing. My problem is what the counterculture liberal folks turned this movie into: An open door 'freedom' movement for the insane.
There was already a lot of movement towards deinstitutionalization back then, but the movie made regular people think they now understood the issue. They did not. Public policy shifted as the culture shifted. Normal citizens started putting pressure on policy makers to shut down mental institutions for everyone except the Charles Mansion type of inmates.
There was also a 1975 Supreme Court case that ruled that you couldn't hold a non-dangerous person in a mental institution if they were capable of surviving independently. The problem is, and we still deal with today is, who defines non-dangerous, and what defines independently?
In the late 1970's and 80's, no one wanted to be thought of as Nurse Rached. No one wanted to say, "Yes these patients have good days, and can be quite normal, but then, they will have an episode, and become extremely violent. I think they should be kept institutionalized."
I'm sure there were people in these facilities saying this is a huge mistake we are making, but those voices were drown out by people who had seen a movie.
So we turned hundreds of thousands, (now in the millions) of mentally challenged people into halfway houses, or just turned them out on the street. We have not been institutionalizing dangerous, mentally ill criminals for decades now. We can lock them up when they break the law, but we don't do even do that in most big-cities.
Go ask a police officer, who are the people you have to deal with every single day? Who are the people they will get a call about today for assaulting a business owner, or a customer at a store, or screaming at people trying to walk down the city sidewalks? They will tell you it's almost always one of the mentally ill people in their town. They know them very well, and they know the nonprofits and NGOs who will go after the police officers if they do anything that could be considered excessive, or against procedures. Many of the 'people experiencing homelessness' fall into this group as well. Addiction and mental illness go hand-in-hand much of the time. Mentally ill people self medicating their way in overdose is so common now, people just ignore it.
We need to fix this, and fast. We as a society, thought we were doing the right thing by turning the mentally ill out on the streets and giving them their 'freedom'. We are now seeing the results of those changes, everyday on our streets today.
We need to have another conversation about this topic right now, because deinstitutionalization has obviously been a complete failure. We can't make our towns and streets safe when there is no place to put mentally ill people.
There are only so many spots in a county jail, or a state prison, and local law enforcement and district attorneys are faced with making a terrible choice every day. Let's say there are only 100 spots available for criminals in their system. They have 200 people that should be locked up to protect the people of their city, so they have to decide who are most dangerous 100, lock them up, and release the other 100 back onto the street. They have to make the best terrible choice they can. Sometimes they get it wrong.
What can we do about this?
I don't know, I'm not a politician, or a billionaire, so what I think should happen doesn't really matter. However, if someone gave me a magic wand, and I could be the Governor of California for a day, and the democrat supermajority would go along with it, I might try this....
I would take the 20 billion dollars Gavin Newsom just committed to keep the fraudulent high-speed rail project on life-support for another decade or so, and start building. Building what? Building mental facilities, treatment centers, group homes, and start moving people off the streets.
Start moving them into a system that can evaluate them, treat them, and give them an opportunity to work their way back into society. If they are able, with treatment and medication, to move to a group home, or to move in with a relative, great. They will be supervised, and given care. If they cannot, if they are too prone to violence, or self harm, we need to move them into a humane mental facility that will keep them, and us, safe.
I don't think it's that hard, but what do I know?
I'm sure there are thousands of people with humanities degrees that will be yelling at me saying I'm wrong. That might be true, but I know that the current system of flooding the city, counties, and state with tax money going to nonprofits and NGOs that are supposed to helping the mentally ill isn't working. We need beds and facilities to treat these people, and for some reason, we don't want to build them. We don't want to help people in ways that might make us cringe, even a tiny bit.
Instead, we'll go back to the 'throw more money at the problem' model, when we have more than enough evidence that model isn't working, and cannot work.
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